00:00:00.000Hey, everyone, it's Anne. So once a month, we pick an episode to make free for everyone. You'll get the whole show, including the Ask Anne Anything segment, which is usually just for paid subscribers. And today's question is about something that plagues most of us, our phones.
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00:00:35.040This is everything my mom prepares for my dad in his 12-hour work days.
00:00:38.900So first are her three-year-old pickles.
00:00:41.220These are Korean cucumbers that she pickled three years ago.
00:00:43.880until this day, they're still very good. All right, next were her three-year-old green chili pickles.
00:00:49.240I think she went on this pickle kick a couple years ago, but here she's making spicy green0.84
00:00:54.060chili pickles. Very similar to the last recipe, but we're using green chili and some of the pickle
00:00:58.960brine to create this very nuanced chili dish that is honestly quite fascinating. I actually brought
00:01:04.520this to America's Test Kitchen and they were absolutely floored by this dish because there
00:01:08.480is a complexity of a three-year-old pickle with fresh bold flavors that just danced in the mouth.
00:01:13.220Then she made some spicy braised tofu, a.k.a. tofu chorim.
00:01:16.820This is the dish that you make if you want to impress someone with Korean food, but with minimal effort.
00:01:21.480All you do is pan fry the tofu until it's light golden brown.
00:01:24.420And while it's doing that, whip up the sauce with some fresh pepper, pour it in, and then braise it until it's plush, tender, and flavored throughout.
00:08:57.540It's just an incredible amount of not just cooking and writing, but planning.
00:09:03.920And how you're really sort of scripting out and storyboarding
00:09:09.160what your book will be from the very beginning.
00:09:12.940I know when the ATK food editors are creating other cookbooks,
00:09:17.100We're envisioning even what a recipe will be, knowing full well that when we go into the kitchen and start cooking, the identity of that dish will change.
00:09:27.160But to create something that is 200, 300, 500 pages long and is balanced and has a cohesive message and vision requires starting at the beginning with a really clear sense of what that is.
00:09:41.720And that can mean mapping out every detail, sort of creating a fake version, so to speak, right from the start.
00:09:50.200And then even when you begin having no idea just how many steps will go through something as seemingly minor as the size of a matchstick cut carrot, when those ingredients are put through their paces by being cross-tested, by being photographed, you realize how much thought goes into the tiniest detail of that cookbook.
00:10:17.980And even when you've been working on books for years, and you'd think you'd have learned how to anticipate everything, every new book feels like starting from scratch because, you know, that book has its own identity.
00:10:31.360And that's what makes the book special is that that book hasn't existed before, right?
00:10:36.000The unknown element of creating a new book is what makes it special.
00:10:40.280And so it's also what makes that challenge one that never goes away.
00:10:44.940Sarah, what was a lot harder than you anticipated?
00:10:47.440I mean, from the start, my mom knew it was going to be a lot of work. And I think cookbooks look glamorous from the outside, especially when they're published and about to be released. But it was one of the most labor intensive things I've ever done. And oh, I don't even know where to begin. It's so incredibly detailed, too, because working with America's Test Kitchen, these cookbooks are different.
00:11:11.080I say that objectively, where when you open the book, you will notice every detail where the time is given, the amount of inches to cut this carrot is given.
00:11:20.280And I think just finding ways to perfect the recipes that wouldn't disappoint, but without it being overbearing was a big challenge.
00:11:30.600And so we just had to find that right balance.
00:11:32.460yeah I love there's a segment where you talk about um I'm forgetting the Korean word for
00:11:38.280essentially like having the right hands for cooking like you just know how to add the
00:11:42.980ingredients yeah um and I love that you included it because it's kind of like either you're going
00:11:49.680to be a good cook or you're not like you can try but sometimes either you you like you got it or
00:11:55.100you don't and your book like the book is trying to give you the tools to be able to have it
00:12:00.700but at some point like there's only so much that you can do and that's kind of magic i don't know
00:12:06.100yeah so that part was the son mat and that's a well-known saying that koreans have with when it
00:12:12.360comes to cooking and it's about how a person who's very talented at cooking the the flavor of their
00:12:18.440hands son mat means um son means hand and mat means flavor it exists within their hands where
00:12:25.300yeah, they're either very talented in the cooking or, or maybe, maybe not. And they need a bit more
00:12:30.920practice. Okay. So we got so many fun questions. We're going to get into them. The first question
00:12:37.000is perfect for Sarah and it comes from Alex. When does a recipe become your own? There's a million
00:12:43.220recipes for everything, pot roast, shortbread cookies, chili lime marinade, and everything in
00:12:49.640between. Surely not all of those start with somebody saying, I had an idea for blank and so
00:12:55.880I started experimenting in my kitchen. So when you start with another recipe as the base for
00:13:01.200something that ends up in your cookbook, what really makes it yours? Are we all just changing
00:13:06.500recipes by one ingredient or a measurement or two and then staking our claim? I'm asking this
00:13:12.600question as someone who often calls things mine when I never actually changed anything about it.
00:13:17.880I just made it so many times that I no longer need to look at the original recipe.
00:13:22.860Okay, so I'm particularly interested in your thoughts here, Sarah, because your cookbook
00:13:27.680is a collaboration with your mom, and your mom says her recipes are how she feels connected
00:13:45.700but i do think that a recipe truly becomes yours when you start to carry your own unique perspective
00:13:52.080to it whether that's through your own technique process ingredient choices and whatnot but i will
00:13:58.820say when we wrote the cookbook omma these recipes don't feel like mine yet right now to me they feel
00:14:05.960like they're completely my mom's they're also when we were developing this didn't feel like there
00:14:11.460were exactly her mom's recipes because my mom kind of updated them so that it fit our family
00:14:17.180and our culture living here in America. So I do think that while some dishes are rooted in
00:14:24.900tradition, like kimchi or other dishes that has a big history to it, the way that you adjust that
00:14:32.820recipe that becomes your own, like the specific balance of seasoning, the small techniques and
00:14:38.660the unwritten rules that they consistently follow, the recipe slowly and surely becomes yours.
00:14:45.620Yeah. Well, and I think also, you know, sometimes when you're cooking from a cuisine that is not
00:14:52.500the cuisine that you grew up in, it's easy to not understand the delineations between like
00:14:57.660a style of Korean cooking that comes from the North first. Similarly to like in America,
00:15:04.100like a cookbook that comes from the South is going to be different from a cookbook that comes
00:15:07.920from minnesota we have to think about the fact that like you know any recipe that is coming from
00:15:12.960your specific family this is going to have different variations than a recipe that comes
00:15:17.800from a different korean family do you know what i mean right right yeah um yeah i adam i'm curious
00:15:24.100have you seen i i feel like i've noticed a lot more cookbooks recently that are a lot more about
00:15:29.220or at least centering the idea of heritage recipes absolutely and cookbooks that focus on
00:15:36.620one family's lived experience or a particular town or a region, whereas 10, 20 years ago,
00:15:44.340the scope of a lot of cookbooks was more broad. It's exciting because you can drill into the
00:15:50.700and learn more about dishes that you might not find on the internet. I don't know if you've
00:15:57.100noticed how, at least when I'm searching for recipes online, I sometimes find the same recipes
00:16:03.600again and again. And one thing I've loved about reading through the pages of Amma is there's
00:16:09.520recipes that I have myself may have been familiar with, but being especially drawn to ones that
00:16:15.320don't get as much of a spotlight. There's one particular recipe in the soups chapter. It's a
00:16:21.880radish and beef soup. I remember reading about how Sarah's mom makes her own beef broth and
00:16:28.940And this reverence for this radish, you know, a particular time of year when the radishes are at their sweetest, and then making it and connecting to the soup the way I would connect to a chicken soup in the dead of winter, and really appreciating cooked radish in a way I hadn't before.
00:16:49.840And getting those recipes, I think you find more of them with books that take a more specific focus, whether it's on a more specific regional cuisine or the cooking of a particular family.
00:17:05.240But you're right that there's a lot more of these coming out.
00:17:07.800And it feels like we're in this golden age of finding recipes at the same time as maybe that's not happening in all parts of the Internet.
00:17:19.840Yeah, I feel like it's almost a reaction in some ways to the number of recipes that you can find on the internet. And the flattening, like you said, like that they all kind of seem the same. So what you get in a cookbook is much more specificity and also the opportunity to explore in a way that for all of its abundance, the internet does not promote exploration of that sort, right?
00:17:44.200Like finding, there isn't a good search ability to find something like a radish soup.
00:17:51.480It also, the internet doesn't encourage deep reading and immersive reading.
00:17:54.900I mean, maybe if you're getting a newsletter and you have it delivered to your inbox, you might be more inclined.
00:17:59.340But I think just searching, people often want to find the end result.
00:18:03.800And, you know, there's a story in, I think it's called A Conversation About Kimchi in Life,
00:18:36.420The recipe may be excellent, but the context just isn't there.
00:18:40.140Yeah. Yeah. I also one thing I was thinking about with this question is in Hedy McKinnon's Tenderhearted, she she has all these vegetables that she loves that no one else seems to love or that are basically like underloved, I think.
00:18:56.740And like having them centered in the book as like, well, you're here.
00:19:02.700Why don't you think about trying this vegetable and promoting them in that way?
00:19:07.480Like that's the sort of thing, again, that like if only on the Internet, if only the most popular recipes rise to the top, you're not going to be exposed to or maybe like cajoled to try these recipes that are outside of your comfort zone or with a vegetable that you didn't know that you even liked if it was prepared this way.
00:23:21.180You know, certainly with people finding a lot of their day-to-day recipes online, the cookbook space, I think, has transitioned into more of a collectible, special object.
00:23:35.240Unless you're talking about sort of workhorse books with very specific subjects like a diabetes cookbook or a slow cooker cookbook, I think those still have a space in sort of a paperback workhorse format.
00:23:47.240But you're right. And Anna is right that these books are getting bigger, they're getting heavier, the paper is getting thicker. And unless you're one of those people, if you live in a city with a tiny apartment, who just wants to pack it cram jam full of cookbooks. And when I see those photos, that always makes my heart happy. But eventually, you're going to move. And having gone through that experience, I can say that those books make excellent gifts. So you can at least upcycle them.
00:24:15.000But, you know, when every time an author is working with their editor, one of the first conversations is, like, what do you want your book to look and feel like?
00:24:25.900Go to the bookstore, you know, feel the pages, look through the pages, pick them up.
00:24:30.840And you can have this experience of your book feeling special and maybe even, you know, if you're lucky, having some special printing elements incorporated into the package without it necessarily being big and heavy.
00:24:44.220In fact, some of the books we've been publishing recently, we just released Baking for Two in February. And for that one, we actually made the book smaller than a lot of our packages, closer to a squarish size, thinking that the concept of Baking for Two is, you know, everything's tiny, right? Why would you want to publish that as a giant book?
00:25:03.800But we debossed the cover, which means that you're pressing a portion of the cover in, and it gives it a really nice feel.
00:25:12.900And so it feels special, but it's also practical.
00:25:16.480And I know that was a conversation we had when starting out with Amaz.
00:25:21.500You know, the designer, Katie Barringer, showed the team a number of different trim sizes, and some were more vertical, taller, some were smaller.
00:25:30.160And we ended up, really, Sarah ended up choosing this trim that is not too big.
00:25:36.840But there are other ways that the book feels special.
00:25:39.460And if you have one copy of the physical book with you, that debossing, you can see that it's been pressed into the name of the book both on the cover and on the spine.
00:32:54.580But here, when I took it to school, I had a completely different reaction that my mom didn't anticipate at all because she, for her, dealing with that type of curiosity, to put it into better words, was something that she never experienced because that's second nature, like packing kimbap to school is second nature to her.
00:33:13.660yeah and the last thing I'll say is that part of the story too is like you were so excited to share
00:33:18.980it with your friends because your mom made these like beautiful like the vegetables the way that
00:33:23.420they were layered was just so beautiful and you were so proud of the work that she did
00:33:27.800and like what it like that that pride though you've returned to it and now you're able to
00:33:33.640to share it with the cookbook absolutely it made me so happy because Trader Joe's recently started
00:33:39.660to sell frozen kimbap. And when I saw that, I immediately had to film it and get my mom's
00:33:44.220reaction. And then it sold out all throughout the United States. And it's like, I'm so happy
00:33:50.780I was part of that where, you know, I just can spread this amazing food with people and have it
00:33:55.740sell out in America. So our next two questions are about the recipes that make the cut to appear
00:34:01.580in the cookbook. This first question comes from Katie. Do cookbook authors have filler recipes
00:34:06.560in their books? In other words, is there a subset of recipes that they really think are suited for
00:34:11.460the home cook? Are they surprised by which recipes end up creating the most buzz? Okay, so let's start
00:34:17.340with Adam. And generally speaking, and I'm not asking you to put anyone on blast here, but have
00:34:21.500there been situations in your experience where you need a couple more filler recipes to get the
00:34:27.560cookbook to a certain length, or that you had to cut because you're like, there's just not enough
00:34:33.380room for everything that we want to do here. So when we're building a table of contents and
00:34:39.780curating our recipe list, we're always cutting. Even if the book has 500 recipes in it,
00:34:46.060we end up somehow with a thousand that we want to put in the book. And that's because we're
00:34:50.260thinking of all the situations when someone might be using the book. If you're cooking chicken,
00:34:55.540maybe you want to cook chicken breast. Maybe you want that breast to be bone in.
00:34:58.980Maybe you want to saute it. Maybe you want to roast it. There are so many options that0.99
00:35:03.140it's always been a winnowing down process. In my experience, I can't think of any times when
00:35:10.680we've ended up with filler recipes. And when you think about the kinds of topics that cookbooks
00:35:16.180are published on, whether that's a cuisine or a category like vegetables or fish, that's so
00:35:21.480immense. You're truly distilling down a universe of food into this small selection. And when I was
00:35:30.260Listening to Katie's question, though, the comment she made about for the home cook, suited for the home cook, I thought was interesting because if we're developing recipes at ATK, everything is suited for the home cook.
00:35:42.520I do wonder whether if you're a restaurant chef, the process could potentially be different where, you know, the amount of work it takes to retest a recipe for the home kitchen really is like creating the recipe from the ground up because the scaling is so distinct.
00:36:00.260So that may be a different experience, but it's not one that I've had.
00:36:06.540There's a cookbook that I own that was written by a famous chef who used to run a very famous restaurant on the island, the small island where I live.
00:36:16.340And I remember buying it and thinking, I don't know.
00:36:18.420I don't know why I thought there would be anything in there for me.
00:36:51.580And, again, you might have a team of people who are all scouring their resources, thinking about different ideas,
00:36:58.980And then we always want, I think of it sort of like frosting a cake where you want to apply a little bit more icing just to make sure you've covered everything.
00:37:07.740And then you start sort of refining the sides and the top until you get a nice shape.
00:37:13.960So it could be 2,000 recipes at the start.
00:37:17.980Sarah, there's a part of the book where you say, like, it's just this little kind of insert.
00:37:22.520And it's like stuff that you can start with.
00:39:16.900And I think that she was the best person to do it because there's no biases in there.
00:39:21.920And she studied our recipes like it was her own.
00:39:25.360Is there anything like as you've shared your mom's cooking online that's gone viral that really surprised you?
00:39:31.660Yeah, that's I actually love that question from Katie, the second part, because, you know, like with Korean recipes, there's always, you know, the big ones that always go viral.
00:39:40.980It's like L.A. Carby, Perugol Gi, Pee Beampap.
00:47:25.300because now we're working with recipes
00:47:27.700that are that have been created by you know sarah's mom and how is how do we handle that
00:47:34.740shepherding process in a way that is careful respectful and and at the same time make sure
00:47:41.380that the result is will be clear and easy to follow by any home cook yeah sarah i'm especially
00:47:46.780interested in thinking about how you thought about translating some korean concepts for like
00:47:53.860how long something should cook or how you should just cook generally? And were there any instances
00:47:59.280where you had to go back and be like, okay, mom, we need a little bit more detail here?
00:48:04.420Yeah. So kind of what Adam was saying, there is a whole process of it. And I think with this book,
00:48:10.900it's the opposite of lack of editing and cookbooks. There's a lot of editing involved.
00:48:15.880And that process that Adam is talking about, my mom would develop the recipes,
00:48:19.540you know it would take her several tries to perfect it and once it was perfected she would
00:48:23.780present it to me we would sit down at the dinner table and be like this is the first step this is
00:48:27.580the second step and then she'll give me the ingredient breakdown and then we'd go into the
00:48:31.120kitchen and I would have to make it with her and watch her make it and then we'll send it off to0.92
00:48:35.920the many editors that we have at America's Test Kitchen you know someone like Valerie who reviews
00:48:40.360it and then Dan who was our food editor and then it went through a proofreader and then a copywriter
00:48:44.240and once all of that was complete and they polished it up so that it looked good they
00:48:49.660encouraged me to retest all the recipes where my mom was not retesting it but I was and that was so
00:48:56.720important because like I mentioned earlier I consider myself more of a storyteller I'm not
00:49:01.600fully there yet in terms of my expertise yeah in terms of being a recipe developer so I retested
00:49:07.360all the recipes one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life but I did learn that Korean
00:49:12.380food's actually fairly easy to make. But then there was moments where I'm just like, wait a
00:49:16.420second, why do you do this, mom? Like why do you put your chicken in the milk for an hour or 30
00:49:22.500minutes? Why do you rinse your meat? And when I asked those questions and got an answer that made
00:49:28.880sense, we would put that, I would relay that information to the editor and she'd be like,
00:49:32.400we need to put this in the book because other people are going to wonder this. And so all of
00:49:37.740those like little inputs and and all the feedback and questions the editors had was put into the
00:49:43.080book and i think this makes the book the opposite of lack of editing because we took a complete
00:49:48.520opposite approach for that can i chime in with one thing that made me laugh and what are your
00:49:53.420tiktoks uh your mom was making kimchi and you're like guys she's using measuring spoons yes like
00:50:01.220she like she had to perfect her recipe and now she follows her own recipe and i thought that was so
00:50:08.640funny yes yes she now uses measuring spoons because in in korean cuisine we don't use0.96
00:50:14.740measuring spoons and everything's by the gram but also in korean cooking they the moms just
00:50:20.240throw things in there's no there's no formality to it but this book made her learn how to use
00:50:25.660measuring spoons and now she uses it because it gave the most delicious kimchi recipe we've made
00:50:31.980yet to date and that was through the use of measuring spoons that's great you know it reminds
00:50:38.420me the way you're describing essentially like recipe checking recipe testing reminds me a lot
00:50:42.880of fact checking in non-fiction books and how oftentimes when i'm working with a really good
00:50:49.140fact checker, they will find something that they'll send to me and that will retexture how I
00:50:56.240write the paragraph, right? Or some of the claim that I make. And the thing about fact checking in
00:51:03.180nonfiction books is that you as an author have to pay for it yourself. It is not paid for by the
00:51:09.380publishing house. And so I, you know, and I don't want to speak for like how other cookbooks get
00:51:15.480made in other publishing houses. But I think sometimes the reason that it doesn't get paid
00:51:19.540for is because the publishing houses themselves, that is a cost that they have offloaded onto the
00:51:25.020author. And for my last book, I think it costs $10,000 to fact check it. So I can understand
00:51:30.960how sometimes that's a step that might not be as thorough in every single cookbook is what I'm
00:51:37.360trying to say. Oh, yeah. No, that's a good point. And cookbook authors typically earn an advance
00:51:42.600from their publisher which you know covers the recipe development testing writing photography
00:51:47.320and like that fact checking that you mentioned but the thing that was amazing with America's
00:51:51.860Test Kitchen is that all of that is in-house for them so they have the photography team they have
00:51:58.080their editors who are fact checking everything and they even hired a Korean language professor
00:52:03.420from Harvard to fact check all my translations no really yeah that's how insane American Test
00:52:10.440is in terms of just producing reputable cookbooks and because of that because I didn't have to worry
00:52:16.560about they even like they came out to California to my home and they even went to the dish store
00:52:23.320where we get all our dishes from so that the photography could actually reflect and use the
00:52:27.680right dishes that we use in our home and they got all the dishes and material and all of that was
00:52:33.440studied and taken care of so that all my mom and I had to worry about was primarily the storytelling
00:52:38.360and the recipes. Wow. Okay, this is a great setup for our next question. And this is these are a
00:52:44.020bunch of practical questions. So we don't have to go super in depth, but we can kind of be the sort
00:52:48.980of things that people are like desperate to know. So this one comes from Stacy. How do you determine
00:52:53.820prep time? Do authors time themselves? I'm guessing they don't add an extra 10 minutes to account for
00:53:00.880less experienced home cooks, because I almost always take a lot longer than the estimate and
00:53:06.700recipes? Okay. So this is a great question because I think that everyone knows that there are varied
00:53:12.000times for how long it takes to chop things. Like me and garlic, I'm just like, I'm taking three
00:53:16.660times longer than the normal person. So who wants to answer this one? I'll go first and say it's
00:53:21.940impossible to determine prep time. You can't add a line to the recipe that says, go take the clothes
00:53:29.640out of the dryer but that's what happens right totally so we we have conversations around adding
00:53:36.600prep time to the recipes and we always take it out because there's no way to figure it out in a way
00:53:40.680that is useful for anyone and we focus on total time and use sort of a an instinctive check on
00:53:48.100how on how much of that is prep and then we do time ourselves when we're cooking but of course
00:53:52.580we're you know someone who's not only a trained chef but has also been making that same dish
00:53:57.820many, many times. So we will add a little bit of a buffer on top of that. We'll also survey
00:54:04.500our fans sometimes and ask them questions about the recipes, including how long did it take you
00:54:10.620to make it? So we do have that sort of home cook feedback. Okay. What about an index? This is a
00:54:16.100question. I'm just summarizing this from Kelly. It's basically like, how do you decide if a
00:54:19.960cookbook has an index or not? I feel every America's Test Kitchen book has an index, but
00:54:24.460Maybe we could talk about why indexes and indices are important.
00:54:29.860What's really interesting about indexes is that there's a lot of ways to create them.
00:54:34.820You can decide, are you indexing just by the name of the dish?
00:54:38.700Are you indexing as well by the key ingredient?
00:54:42.060Are you indexing by the secondary ingredient?
00:54:44.880So maybe, you know, you might look up rosemary.
00:54:47.840Most indexes don't have space to accommodate the rosemary, but it's nice to have.
00:54:53.200There are also authors who will create custom editions, like maybe they index by gluten-free recipes, even though it's not a gluten-free cookbook, or they'll index by fast recipes, though it's not a fast cookbook.
00:55:03.900And so a good indexer can create an index that is ideally suited to the content if you have space.
00:55:11.060Although I will also say that if you are running high on page count, we often look to the index as our last-ditch chance to cut two pages from the book.
00:55:19.980I will also note, I'm glad that you use the word indexer, that this is, again, it's a job. It is a skill.
00:55:28.460It takes time. I think sometimes people are like, oh, well, you just have to figure out like where all the rosemary is and all the recipes, but it is complicated.
00:55:38.820And so, yeah, it can be something, a corner that I think in some books that it might get cut.
00:55:45.820Okay, last question is about, I think, everyone's favorite part of the cookbook, the pictures.
00:59:18.060And then, you know, having a strong photographer who's got a great eye for getting an angle.
00:59:24.300Maybe if you have food that's mostly brown, as a lot of delicious food is, it's getting an angle that shows off the texture of the food and the natural light sort of glinting off of particular areas, showing shadow in particular ways.
00:59:37.640So it's a more organic way into finding the beauty that still makes the food the star.
01:01:16.180from Nora. Do you have any advice for how to not be on my smartphone so damn much? Something that's
01:01:22.420actually worked for you or someone you know? Yes, I feel like a lot of us are thinking about this,
01:01:27.620right i have written about my relation to my phone and social media just generally
01:01:33.780like three times over the last six months and one of the pieces that i wrote which is about
01:01:39.340this social media sea change i cite i think like four other articles that all talk about
01:01:45.820changing relationships to social media more specifically which i think is oftentimes
01:01:51.300one of the primary tethers to our phone but not the exclusive one so my advice on this
01:01:59.020and people are going to get mad about it because I think we come up with all sorts of reasons on
01:02:04.040why it's difficult to change entrenched habits is going to throw us back to a time when we also
01:02:11.280managed to survive the world but my advice is that you just need to leave your phone at home
01:02:16.960more. Oh, that feels so scary. What if there's an emergency? If there's an emergency, then I mean,
01:02:24.920what happens in other times when there's an emergency? What happened 50 years ago when there
01:02:29.380was an emergency? It's terrifying to think about. I mean, people like figured it out, right? And
01:02:35.180emergencies happen statistically seldom. How do you know how to get to where you're going without
01:02:40.780your phone? How do you drive there without listening to Taylor Swift? A few things. A few
01:02:46.380things that i would say is that you need to start small and i started with not taking my phone with
01:02:52.400me on walks dog walks so i take a 45 minute to an hour long walk with the dogs every morning
01:02:58.300that's my half of the the dog walking labor and i used to take my phone with me because i love
01:03:04.760taking pictures and i'm like what if i miss a really gorgeous shot right and that would be my
01:03:09.360justification and i do i miss really gorgeous moments all the time and in those moments i have
01:03:15.220to take a picture with my heart and remember it that way uh and other times though i would find
01:03:23.100if i had my phone with me i would take it out and like check for notifications text back like
01:03:28.320just generally take myself out of that very grounding very like it's cheesy to say meditative
01:03:36.420because i'm certainly not meditating it's just like my mind is just there and if i have the phone
01:03:42.680it's going to take me away so start with walks and then you can do things like oh I'm just
01:03:49.020quickly going over to a friend's house that I know how to drive to you know what I mean yeah
01:03:54.720like you don't need directions on how to get there um and I you know I don't think that you
01:04:00.340should leave it at home for major things but I do think that it's easier to leave it for smaller
01:04:05.200things and then the other thing that I will say is that you can make your phone less useful to you
01:04:12.560and some people go super extreme on this by making their phones essentially dumb phones
01:04:19.720like there are all sorts of things you can buy online that are kind of like great scale
01:04:23.700great scale you don't have to pay for you can actually just set your iphone uh to always be
01:04:30.260on grayscale or i think you can set it to like certain times of day it turns grayscale and then
01:04:35.120it's just like not as fun to look at totally it's like an old school game boy you're like what am i
01:04:39.060yeah yeah i did you still love my old school game boy but uh i took uh my email off my phone
01:04:47.880oh i love that which is like very controversial but what i did and this is a good compromise
01:04:55.240so iphones in particular have this new function where you can delete something but not wholly
01:05:02.660delete it so you say like okay you do that oh yes like remove from it removes it so you don't see it
01:05:10.700and in an emergency you could scroll all the way to the end to do the search bar put in gmail
01:05:16.180and it will pop up for you but it is not there a little bit of friction a lot of friction yeah so i
01:05:24.160very very rarely use like i deleted it entirely and then um now i have it so it's just like that
01:05:31.740So that I don't have to go through the process if I really do need it for something of downloading it again, signing in, all of that stuff.
01:05:39.340But I did find when I initially got rid of it, I was like, how am I going to return this thing with the QR code, right?